Meet ghosts, Volvo ocean racers and a 1,900-mile runner in this week’s paper

If ghosts do haunt historic places, they may view ghost hunters of Melissa Barba’s ilk with the same distaste long-time celebrities feel for paparazzi. Two or three centuries into the job of haunting, a new generation comes hunting with intrusive paraphernalia: flashlights, cameras, camcorders and voice recorders. So, if you follow Barba’s instructions in this week’s feature, “If There Be Spirits, Now’s the Time to Find Them,” don’t be surprised if the...

The Beaufort Wind Force Scale puts the threshold for a half-gale at 20 miles per hour. These stiff Bay winds are projected to be with us intermittently into November.
Winds like these cheer the hearts of sailboat skippers after the doldrums of summer. But anglers on the Chesapeake suffer at being blown off the water as the season winds down.
To calm the turmoil that gens up in my angler’s innards when I realize another Maryland winter is fast...

Straw-Bale Gardening Works
Re: www.bayweekly.com/node/23750
Siberian kale grows happily on bales of straw.
This summer, I experimented with soilless gardening in bales of straw. The trick is priming the bales with fertilizer. I used 21⁄2 cups per bale of high-nitrogen lawn fertilizer minus all herbicides, testing both organic and inorganic.
I prepared the bales in mid-August, inserting a long-shank thermometer and irrigating two to three times...

The waxing moon reaches first-quarter Thursday, and as darkness falls on Halloween, it shines high in the south, with the bright star Fomalhaut almost straight below.
As a holiday, Halloween stretches back thousands of years, but not as a day of costumes and trick-or-treating. It coincides with earth’s path around the sun, falling midway between autumnal equinox and winter solstice.
The Celts of pre-Christan Britain called this cross-quarter day...

There is nothing like the rat-a-tat of briskly delivered dialogue to transport an audience to a different time and place, and Colonial Players is currently doing the job atop the broad shoulders of Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men.
If you think having seen the movie is enough, think again. First time director Jeff Sprague has hit the trifecta with this production: a believable cast, intelligent staging and a vocal pace that sometimes threatens to leave you breathless. It...

John Wick (Keanu Reeves: 47 Ronin) is hanging on by a thread. Numbed by the death of his wife, he goes through his daily routine on autopilot. Anticipating her husband’s reaction to her demise, Wick’s wife planned a companion for his recovery: a beagle puppy named Daisy.
As Wick warms to the pup, a trio of Russian gangsters warms to his tricked-out Mustang. They break into his house, beat him senseless, kill poor Daisy and abscond with the car.
...

How do you use the Bay, and what will you do to keep this great resource alive and well?
District 27 State Senate
Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D–Chesapeake Beach)
Lawyer; lawmaker since 1971, all but four years in the Senate with a record 27 years as its president, making him Maryland’s most powerful lawmaker, apparently immune to Calvert’s current Republican leaning.
A healthy Bay is critical to our quality of life. We must prioritize our efforts to reduce...

“I hear a buzz. … It’s a group text but all the numbers are blocked. It reads check out this geek, and the picture connected to it is of my best friend Sarah.”
Those words, and the thousand following, won Central Middle School’s Jenna O’Connell first prize in this year’s Fred B. Benjamin Peace Writing Contest for Middle Schoolers.
Sarah is author O’Connell’s creative response to the cruelty of cyber-...

We’re a little worried about our new neighbors. They’re a well-dressed couple, but their reputation precedes them — malodorously.
Skunks are more often smelled than seen. Now that we’re seeing them, can smelling them be far behind?
Not necessarily, according to Maryland Department of Natural Resources. It costs a skunk a lot of energy to spray a load of musk at you or your dog. That’s energy they’d rather preserve,...

To a lot of us, Election Day means no more than Push-the-Peanut Day.
A record low of 21 percent of Marylanders voted in June’s Primary Election. General Elections about double that percent.
That indifference I don’t quite get, for I love to vote. Election Day is as patriotic a date to me as the Fourth of July. True, punching my ballot, even for the candidates I most believe in, isn’t as much fun as parades and fireworks. But I feel...